Been lots of talk about rebuilding in town, right?
Hey, we're bounding down that same road.
After a month's worth of meetings, research, more meetings and more research, we've reached the conclusion, my wife Dali and I, that we're going to blow up the site you see and start from scratch. Completely new tech. No carryover.
Meaning none at all ...
Mind you, we haven't figured out exactly how we're going to do that. Nor how we're going to finance it. But both those facets also have been part of the monthlong back-and-forth, and we're eminently confident it'll come to pass and, in fact, that it'll be underway sooner rather than later.
What'll it be like?
Well, here's what it won't be like: It won't be a WordPress-based, Frankenstein-type construction built on 27 different patchwork plugins, each requiring its own maintenance and manipulations. This is the root of all our issues. For all the fun we had in starting this venture in 2014, we did so with zero upfront money and, rather than ever having a custom-made site, we just kept grafting garbage onto garbage onto garbage.
This will be a custom site. Just for our readership. It'll be fast, clean and user-friendly when it comes to the community, multimedia, reader accessibility and other new wrinkles that maybe we still haven't conceived. And again, it'll be based on five years of learning what you need and want from it. Not just the login thing. Everything.
The one thing we'd like to preserve is the general look, albeit with some vital tweaks. People often compliment the site's structure/arrangement -- the one area we can control ourselves, I might add -- and that'll be part of this, too.
Oh, and this: We might scrap the apps.
Our research and meetings have motivated us to very strongly consider switching from the standard Apple/Android models to what's called a PWA, or Progressive Web App. It looks like an app, works like an app, plants an icon on your phone like an app. The main difference is that it works precisely the same way on all devices, all platforms. Including, for the first time in our case, Amazon, Microsoft and other types.
If you want more details on that, we've got some techie subscribers I'm sure would be happy to elaborate in comments.
Android's been an absolute train wreck from Day 1, and even Apple's been a pain in its own way behind the scenes. Eliminating them would be a blessing. It's even been broached that we could kill Android outright in the very near future and encourage readers to use a mobile browser on their Android devices. (Which work perfectly, by the way.) But first, we've got to ensure that the PWA meets all of your needs and, indeed, represents an upgrade from the user's view. We'll see how that plays out.
I'll answer any and all questions about this below.
JASON'S FIGHT
Our own Jason Rollison's in for a fight, but it's one he'll win.
He was diagnosed with cancer yesterday, as he shared publicly in his own powerful words last night:
Some personal news pic.twitter.com/NSo5dZ3Z9p
— Jason Rollison (@jrollisonpgh) August 16, 2019
He and I have been in touch for days now regarding an unrelated health issue, and then, after this, we communicated some more. He has passion for his work, as our readers see every weekday in Mound Visit. I'm a big believer that passion is passion, that it isn't selective. He'll fight this. He'll win.
LIFETIMES ALL GONE
If anyone missed it earlier this week in What's Brewing, we did sell the last of the 100 allotted Lifetime Lunatic subscriptions for the year. That brought the overall total to 600 Lifetimes, and that, to be candid, might be it.
When we began the program a couple years ago, my wife and I, we joked that we'd never even sell 20. I mean that. I remember exactly where we were when we said it. Well, you've outdone that by, uh, 580, and twice now we've had to shut it down from getting out of hand. For obvious reasons, we can't sell an excess of these because of the need for recurring revenue, and we'd need a really big influx of new subscribers to offer another round. So, we'll see.
Anyway, thank you.
VETERAN COUNT: 298
Early this year, our friend Josh DeNinno at Moon Golf Club came up with the concept of pushing all of us to reach 1,000 full-year military subscriptions for the calendar year through his Veterans Challenge. And to back that, Josh is buying 10 a month himself for a total of 100, leaving 900 for everyone else.
To date, we've sold 298. That's awesome and appreciated. It'll be a heck of a climb to meet the goal, but it's not impossible.
BECOME A PARTNER
We're always looking to grow our base of business partners, and there currently are several very good opportunities available to take advantage of our unprecedented reach. Our 2019 media kit has all the info you’d want. Email my wife at Dali@DKPittsburghSports.com to set up a meeting.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• New subscribers for 2019 are at 650. You can track this figure daily at the bottom of the desktop and tablet versions of the site.
• Our daily page views, averaged out over the past 30 days, are at 88,592. The goal with this figure is to average 100,000 — a number we've achieved only during the two Stanley Cup runs.
• Our most-hit original article of the past week was Matt Sunday's wonderful View from the Sideline photo essay on the Steelers' first practice after Darryl Drake's passing at 48,831. The Steelers accounted for 200,988 page views, the Pirates 114,547, and the Penguins 58,464.
• We're at 33,086 (+133) followers on Twitter, we're at 32,042 (+5) page likes on Facebook, we're at 11,297 (+32) followers on Instagram. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
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• We make mistakes. If you see one, email Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
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